Early Feminist Theory and the" Querelle des Femmes", 1400-1789

Early Feminist Theory and the "Querelle des Femmes", 1400-1789 Author(s): Joan Kelly Source: Signs, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 4-28 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173479 Accessed: 26/08/2009 13:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs. http://www.jstor.org Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400-1789 Joan Kelly We generally think of feminism, and certainly of feminist theory, as taking rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most histories of the Anglo-American women's movement acknowledge feminist "forerunners" in individual figures such as Anne Hutchinson, and in women inspired by the English and French revolutions, but only with the women's rights conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 do they recognize the beginnings of a continuously developing body of feminist thought. Histories of French feminism claim a longer past. They tend to identify Christine de Pisan (1364-1430?) as the first to hold modern feminist views and then to survey other early figures who followed her in expressing prowoman ideas up until the time of the French Revolution.1 Yet The complete version of this paper with full detail and documentation will appear in my forthcoming book Women,History, and Theory(Chicago: University of Chicago Press). I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding the research for this paper as part of a larger study of the history of feminist thought and to Christina Greene for her invaluable work as my research assistant. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Power and Authority in the Seventeenth Century, Reid Hall, Paris, October 21, 1981, and was discussed at the Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society, November 23, 1981. I am indebted to participants at both meetings for many helpful suggestions. Particular thanks go to Bonnie Anderson, Adrienne Block, Blanche Cook, Clare Coss, Martin Fleisher, Patricia Gartenberg, Danielle HaaseDubosc, Allison Heisch, Abby Kleinbaum, Claudia Koonz, Gerda Lerner, Rosalind Petchesky, Catharine Stimpson, Amy Swerdlow, Paula Wiggins, and Marilyn Young. To Moira Ferguson I am deeply appreciative for the benefit of exciting conversations about her-work on early feminism, for her careful editing of my own manuscript, and for the use of her unpublished materials, which she generously shared with me. 1. For French feminism, see L&on Abensour, Histoire gene&aledu feminisme (1921; reprint ed., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979), and La Femmeet lefeminisme avant la Revolution (Paris: E. Leroux, 1923); Lula McDowell Richardson, The Forerunners of Feminism in French Literatureof the Renaissance:From Christineof Pisa [sic] to Marie de Gournay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929). For the Anglo-American tradition, I am referring [Sigw: Journal of W'omenin Culture and Soc(iet 1982, vol. 8, no. 1] O 1982 by T'he Universsity of Chicago. All rights reserived. 0097-9740/83/0801-0003$01.00 4 Signs Autumn 1982 5 even this literature obscures the sense of a tradition of feminist theory predating the revolution. Because there was no women's movement in this period, it has seemed legitimate to allow the men who spoke on behalf of women to figure just as much, and usually more, than women in such accounts. Feminist women scarcely appear in most books on feminist thought in early modern French and English literature,2 and when they do, they and their ideas seem isolated, separated from each other and from us by long periods of silence and inactivity. New work is now appearing that will give us a fuller sense of the richness, coherence, and continuity of early feminist thought,3 and I hope this paper contributes to that end. What I hope to demonstrate is that there was a 400-year-old tradition of women thinking about women and sexual politics in European society before the French Revolution. Feminist theorizing arose in the fifteenth century, in intimate association with and in reaction to the new secular culture of the modern European state. It emerged as the voice of literate women who felt themselves and all women maligned and newly oppressed by that culture, but who were empowered by it at the same time to speak out in their defense. Christine de Pisan was the first such feminist thinker, and the four-century-long debate that she sparked, known as the querelle desfemmes, became the vehicle through which most early feminist thinking evolved. to the orientation implicit in most monographic work rather than to general historical accounts of feminism, such as Eleanor Flexner's treatment of American feminism, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Athenaeum Publishers, 1970), and Sheila Rowbotham's Women,Resistance and Revolution: A History of Womenand Revolution in the ModernWorld (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). Rowbotham's sound and general history of feminism focuses on women coming "to revolutionary consciousness"; hence it does not linger over early feminist thought preceding or outside the revolutionary tradition. 2. For more on Christine's role in the literature, see n. 9 below. 3. Moira Ferguson's First Feminists: An IntroductoryEssay and a Collection of Early Feminist Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, in press) is preeminent among such works for giving a sense of the abundance and continuity of feminist writing in the early modern period, although it concerns only English writers. Additional forthcoming works are Hilda Smith's study of seventeenth-century English feminism, Ruth Perry's biography of Mary Astell, and Patricia Gartenberg's anthology of women's writings of the English Renaissance. See also Patricia Gartenberg and Nena T. Whittemore, "A Checklist of English Women in Print, 1475-1640," Bulletin of Bibliographyand Magazine Notes 34, no. 1 (January-March 1977): 1-13; Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, The Female Spectator:English Women Writers before 1800 (Old Westbury, N.Y., and Bloomington: Feminist Press and Indiana University Press, 1977); and Allison Heisch, ed., English Women in Print: 14751700, a partially completed project based at the Huntington Library. The early feminists did not use the term "feminist," of course. If they had applied any name to themselves, it would have been something like defenders or advocates of women, but it is fair to call this long line of prowomen writers that runs from Christine de Pisan to Mary Wollstonecraft by the name we use for their nineteenth- and twentieth-century descendants. Latter-day feminism, for all its additional richness, still incorporates the basic positions the feminists of the querelle were the first to take. 6 Kelly Early Feminist Theory The genre of the querelle was to remain popular through the late eighteenth century, when a new radical content began to transform the thematic concerns of the old debate. Although still reactive to misogyny, feminists affected by the French Revolution felt themselves part of a new and hopeful future for women. As they broached the economic, political, and sexual issues of the impending women's movement, they were animated by a notion of progress and intentional social change. Most of the earlier feminist theorists lacked such a vision of social movement to change events. Until the time when a women's movement would join feminist theory and practice, the feminists of the querelle carried on their long and patient intellectual resistance at a remove from action.4 Yet their innovation should not be overlooked. Reacting to changes over which they seemed to have no control, their concern lay with consciousness. By their pens, they meant to counteract the psychological consequences of what they felt was a recent, steady decline in the position of women. And in so doing, they created not only a new body of ideas but also the first feminist theory: a stance, an outlook within which ideas develop, a "theory" in the original sense of the term as a conceptual vision. Three basic positions constitute the stance of early feminism: 1. The defenses of women that belong to the querelleand the educational writings related to them are almost all polemical.5 In these writ4. Ihere were feminist activities, of course, in the early modern period. The Beguines of the late medieval cities were certainly feminist in their opposition to male subjection of w omen. These were celibate laywomen who sought to live in their own communities and to support themselves by their collective work. Living communally and taking only temporary religious vows, they escaped two of the major institutions of male power: the family and the church. Social acceptance was another matter, however, and when state and church combined to crush the movement, they succeeded. Nonetheless, the will to independence from male authority was clearly present with the Beguines, as it was during the revolutionary days of the English sects. In the 1640s and 1650s, many of the radical sects supported religious equality for women. In this climate, in which it was acceptable to assail patriarchal rule in general, there were women who actively liberated themselves from male clerical to authority and their husbands as well, who sought to control their own consciences, call I would and economic educational women's and to opportunities. improve preach, these women, like Anne Hutchinson, who resembled them in seventeenth-century New their England, "feminists in action" rather than theorists, however. Rather than elaborate ideas in writing, they used them to modify or organize social forms in which women might be free of male power and authority over them. Some seventeenth-century sectarians who held decidedly feminist views, such as the English Quakers Margaret Fell Fox and Elizabeth Bathurst, are known for their writings as well as their social activity. I would of argue, however, that their feminist ideas remain in the context and in the service causes religious dissent. In general, we might say that the early feminist activists promoted that subsumed the interests of women whereas the theorists were animated by a purely feminist cause but did not see how social morvement or women at large might promote it. 5. Moira Ferguson noted this in "Feminist Polemic: The Earliest Feminist Writings in English frormthe Renaissance to the French Revolution" (paper presented at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 30, 1979), as well as in her introduction to First Feminists. l'oelns, plays, and novels are further sources for feminist Autumn 1982 Signs 7 ings, women took a conscious stand in opposition to male defamation and mistreatment of women. Their ideas arose as a dialectical opposition to misogyny. 2. In their opposition, the early feminists focused on what we would now call gender. That is, they had a sure sense that the sexes are culturally, and notjust biologically, formed. Women were a social group, in the view of early feminists. They directed their ideas against the notions of a defective sex that flowed from the misogynous side of the debate and against the societal shaping of women to fit those notions. 3. Their understanding of misogyny and gender led many feminists to a universalist outlook that transcended the accepted value systems of the time. Feminists of the querelle appreciated how their opponents' misogyny reflected the social position of their male authors. By exposing ideology and opposing the prejudice and narrowness it fostered, they stood for a truly general conception of humanity. The Querelle Commences As early modern Europe underwent the process of state formation, princely rule, rank, and hierarchy coexisted with bourgeois modes of life and work and with a developing republican (liberal) ethos. Feminist theory was shaped by the new pressures this society placed on women and was stimulated by its possibilities. On the one hand, aristocratic women lost considerable economic, political, and cultural power in relation not only to their feudal forebears but to men of their own class. On the other hand, a new class of women was created according to a new gender construction of the domestic lady. The contents of early feminist theory reflect the declining power of women of rank and the enforced domestication of middle-class women. Yet it owes its very being to new powers of education that some of the women had at their command. Early feminist theory is rooted in the humanistic form of literacy some women acquired while it was being denied to women as a sex. The struggle of the querellewas carried on by women of the higher ranks or, more often, by the female members of a distinctly modern, literate class that served the upper reaches of a ranked society.6 This professional learned class, both male and female, strode onto the stage of modern history, along with the business families from which they largely derived. Many of the feminist writers, such as Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and the Venetian poet Lucrezia Marinella, had merchant fathers ideas, becoming particularly rich in the late seventeenth century and eighteenth century. I use only those that form part of the querelle. 6. Two notable exceptions to the bourgeois or aristocratic origins of most of the early feminist theorists are the pseudonymous authors Mary Tattlewell and Joane Hit-himHome of The Women'sSharpe Revenge (London, 1640). Mary Collier, who wrote The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. StephenDuck (London, 1739), was a laundress. 8 Kelly Early Feminist Theory and/or husbands. Many more were the sisters, daughters, and nieces of humanist teachers who educated them. Rachel Speght was probably educated by her schoolteacher father, as Mary Astell was by her clergyman uncle. Bathsua Makin, Judith Drake, and Elizabeth Elstob were the sisters of Oxbridge fellows and shared in their learning. In the main, the early feminist theorists were the forebears of what Virginia Woolf called in revolt against the "the daughters of educated men"-daughters fathers who schooled some of them for a society they forbade all women to enter. Even to share in private the learning and outlook of their humanist relations or teachers had a dramatic effect on these women. Sharing meant discovering that the universal ideal of humanitas that the new learning fostered, the notion of education as cultivating the human in man, was not meant for "man" male and female anymore than were the occupations of the literati. This is the contradictory situation from which a women's consciousness arose that was at once modern and feminist. No sooner had a humanistic outlook started to form among the upper reaches of lay society, in short, and among its authors and teachers, than a fateful dialectic began between its female and male proponents. Imbued with renascent ideas of civic virtue, humanism was far more narrow in its views of women than traditional Christian culture. The religious conception of women, although misogynist in its own way, did regard women as equally capable of the highest states "man" could attain: salvation and sainthood. Classical republican thought, rooted in a society that confined women to a gynecaeumand reserved political life for men, threw in doubt this sense of a single human destiny-or even a single human nature. As Boccaccio said of almost all the illustrious women he commemorated in his De claris mulieribus (1355-59), "What can we think except that it was an error of nature to give female sex to a body which had been endowed by God with a magnificent virile spirit?"7 Only as viragos, as exceptions to their sex, could women aspire to the Renaissance ideal of man.8 Some women (and men) who belonged to the new literate class and/or benefited from its learning opened the first round of written feminist expression by expressly opposing this renewed belittlement of women as a sex. The first such feminist voice was that of Christine de Pisan. She heads the development of modern French liter7. Giovanni Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, trans. and introduction by Guido Guarino (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 127; see also pp. xxxvii, 87, 131, and 217. 8. On viragos, see Allison Heisch, "Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy," FeministReview 4 (February 1980):45-56; Margaret King, "Thwarted Ambitions: Six Learned Women of the Italian Renaissance," Soundings: An InterdisciplinaryJournal 59 (Fall 1976): 280-304; "The Religious Retreat of Isotta Nogarola (1418-1466): Sexism and Its and Society3, no. Consequences in the Fifteenth Century," Signs:Journal of Womenin Culture 4 (Summer 1978): 807-22; and "Book Lined Cells," in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Womeno/ the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980), pp. 66-90. Signs Autumn 1982 9 ature much as Petrarch does that of Italy, and she defined what was to become the modern feminist sensibility. Christine was a humanist herself by profession and was married to a royal secretary. Educated in French and Italian literature and some Latin by her Italian father, who was a councillor and a physician at the court of Valois France, she decided to support herself, her children, and her widowed mother as a copyist and author when she was widowed at the age of twenty-five. She studied throughout her life and turned out some fifteen volumes of work in seventy large notebooks. Although most of her work was widely diffused, bringing her both fame and subsidies, Christine suffered a variety of humiliations in attending the royal court on her own behalf and had to brave whistles and shouts on the streets as well as in the palace. She was crossing a line between private and public life that was to be drawn with increasing firmness for middle-class and even noble women. Indeed, none of the feminists who followed her were able to lead so independent and public a life until the seventeenthcentury dramatist Aphra Behn, who herself was unusual for her time. Beginning in 1399, Christine wrote a series of works in which she set herself up as a defender of her sex, criticizing and rebutting the sharp turn toward misogyny in the attitudes and reading of her time. For a woman to talk back to ribaldry and misogyny was new-at least in the written language of literature and learning. Christine was fully aware of the novelty of her position. She wondered, in her major "defense" of women, The City of Women(1404), why women had not yet taken up their pens to protest the vile things written and said about them. Three visionary ladies who inspired Christine to do so assured her, however, that this task was destined for her, among all other women. She was to be the first to have the "new thought" to write on "what might be the cause ... that so many different men, clerics and others,. . . think and write so much slander and such blame of women and their condition."9 9. The Boke of the Cyte of Ladys, trans. Brian Anslay (London, 1521), 1:3, 2:53. I have modernized the spelling and, where necessary, the words of the text, here and in the other early English writings I quote. The standard biography of Christine is by Marie-Joseph Pinet, Christinede Pisan, 1364-1430: Etude bibliographiqueet litteraire(Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1927). For a concise contemporary assessment of her work, see Susan Groag Bell, "Christine de Pizan: Humanism and the Problems of a Studious Woman," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1976): 173-84. See also Rose Rigaud, Les Ideesfeministes de Christinede Pisan (Neuchatel: Attinger Freres, 1911). Christine's role is not adequately appreciated in the literature on the querelle, primarily because these works concentrate on male authors. Blanche Hinman Dow did see The City of Women as "the point of departure for that literature in defense of women which was to attest the new interest in an old quest," although she gave no reasons for her judgment (The Varying Attitude toward Women in French Literatureof the Fifteenth Century [New York: Institute of French Studies, 1936], p. 128). Also, Emile Telle noted how Christine reoriented the medieval clerical debate on marriage to a debate on women (L'Oeuvrede Marguerited'Angouleme:Reine de Navarre et la querelle desfemmes [1937; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969], pp. 9-43). For the early history of the 10 Kelly Early Feminist Theory During the century before Christine, several kinds of literature on love, marriage, and women were popular. The courtly tradition was generally prowoman in the sense of chivalric, but there were also decidedly misogynist clerical and secular bourgeois traditions. By 1400, in the secular (and vernacular) literature of England and France, the earlier "gentle" attitudes of the court were losing ground before fabliaux and poems of bourgeois origin, vigorous and crude in their criticism of nobility and clergy-as well as women, love, and marriage. Jan de Meung's section of the Roman de la rose (1277) is the classic statement of this kind of mockery of women and chivalric love. It echoed thirteenthcentury invectives against women, such as Le Blastonge desfames and Le Blasme desfames, and it sanctioned them in a work of undeniable literary merit. As the Roman de la rose (which was taken up by Chaucer in England) and the bourgeois satires were imitated by noble as well as clerical and bourgeois authors, efforts were made to shore up the waning spirit of courtesy. In 1399 a knightly order, Ordre de l'Escu Vert a la Dame Blanche, was founded in France for the defense of women's interests and honor, and in 1400 the dukes of Bourbon and Burgundy organized a "court of love" for the same purpose, to which Christine belonged. It was in this context that Christine wrote her poem of 1399, Epitre au dieu d'amours,deploring the great vogue of the Roman de la rose, the attitudes it promoted toward women, and its reduction of romance to sexual conquest-and abandonment.10 This intervention on behalf of women provoked a minor querellede la rose, as it is called-a set of letters and poems in which Christine was reproached for her daring and her reputation called into question, and An Analytical querelle, see also Richardson (n. 1 above); Francis Lee Utley, The CrookedRib: Index to the Argument about Womenin English and Scots Literatureto the End of the Year 1568 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1944); and Ruth Kelso, Doctrine/or the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956). For the later English literature, see Ferguson, First Feminists (n. 3 above); Carroll Camden, The Elizabethan Woman (Houston: Elsevier Press, 1952); The CambridgeHistory of English Literature, 15 vols. (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 3:99-102; Doris May Stenton, The English Womanin History (1956; New York: Schocken Books, 1977), pp. 27-51, 205-8, 292-98. For a superb social analysis of the seventeenth-century querellein France, see Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-CenturyFrance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976). Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate:A History of Misogyryin Literature(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), covers a good portion of the misogynist side of the debate. 10. Oeuvrespoetiques, ed. M. Roy, 3 vols. (Paris: Societe des Anciennes Textes Fran;aises, 1886-96), 2:1-27. Adrienne Block has shown a similar development in French court centuries songs in which chivalric sentiments were supplanted in the fifteenth and sixteenth from over taken and seduction songs of themes popular rape by coarsely expressed ("Images of Women in Sixteenth-Century French Popular Song," mimeographed [Center for the Study of Women and Society, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York, 1981]). Signs Autumn 1982 11 in which she defended herself and intensified her criticism of de Meung's work as "an exhortation to vice."'1 Although troubled by the storm she aroused, she was apparently undaunted, for in 1404 she took on another highly popular satiric work, written about a decade after the Roman, expressing the clerical strain of medieval misogyny. Les Lamentations de Matheolusenumerates a cleric's complaints following his marriage to a widow. Christine found Matheolus to be of little literary significance, but she was deeply disturbed by the prevalence of the clerical attacks on women and marriage that he stood for or drew upon. Most of them, as she noted, were meant to dissuade fellow clerics from marriage and the loss of sinecures they would suffer thereby. But in addition to their commonplace complaints against the married life, these works were filled with a loathing for women and the female body.12 This literature inspired The City of Women,in which Christine transformed the genre of clerical debate over the celibate or married state, as well as the genre of secular satire and defense of marriage, love, and women. Christine focused on just one issue: the attack on women that these writings contained. Moreover, her defense of women was shaped by a theoretical intention. Unlike the few thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poems, such as Dit desfemmes and Bien desfames, that praised women in response to the invectives against them, Christine's new thought was to investigate as well as to rebut misogyny. And most remarkable, the debate on women that Christine launched no longer presented two maledefined sides of the issue, as had the clerical debate on marriage and the bourgeois satires and responses. Christine created a space for women to oppose this onslaught of vilification and contempt, and the example of her defense was to serve them for centuries. Although men continued to write in defense of women, what is utterly novel about the querelle des femmes is that women seized on it to counter for themselves the misogynist voice of literate opinion on women's inferiority.'3 11. On the querellede la rose, see Charles F. Ward, The Epistleson the Romanceof theRose and Other Documentsin the Debate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1911); Dow (n. 9 above); and Richardson (n. 1 above). 12. Epitreau dieu d'amours,in Oeuvrespotiques, ed. M. Roy (Paris: Societe des Anciennes Textes Francaises, 1886-96). As Leon Battista Alberti wrote: "You can never love her [woman] without bitterness, fear, misfbrtune, and worry. Malevolent creature, given us by nature in too great abundance, so that no place is free of them; if you love them, they will torment you and enjoy keeping you to themselves, having torn you from yourself and your own spirit." This is a humanistic paraphrase of a twelfth-century clerical piece by Walter Map, Dissuasio Valerii, in Leon BattistaAlberti:Operevolgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 2:372. Alberti also wrote Della Famiglia (1434), one of' the best-known Renaissance treatises in praise of marriage and family, in which classical forms of misogyny augment and reshape the medieval attitudes. 13. Martin Le Franc cited Christine as an example for women in his very influential Le Championdes dames (1440-42); Pierre Monnier de Lesnauderie did the same in La Louange de mariage et des femmesvertueuses(1534), expressly recommending The City of Women. Like Christine, Frantcois de Billon built a "fort" for women, using illustrious women as his 12 Kelly Early Feminist Theory Developments on the misogynist side of the new and the older debates were not nearly as dramatic. The former position of the clerics and schoolmen in the debate over the celibate versus the marital state, the contemplative versus the active life, was overwhelmed by the promarriage and profamily treatises of the humanists and reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But these works were by no means feminist, despite their reconciliation with sexuality. Indeed, the growing acceptance of an active and familial life as the social norm, which accompanied the rise of bourgeois society and the state, fed directly into the new debate on women and accounts for much of its popularity. The "moderns" on the misogynist side of the querelledesfemmesdropped some (but only some) of the clerical abhorrence of female sexuality and invoked scripture primarily on the issue of a wife's subjection to her husband. Like the Greco-Roman authors they preferred to draw on, their intent was not to dissuade anyone from marriage but to justify woman's confinement to it because of her rational inferiority to man. "Surely all can never be mistaken," runs a typical "learned" diatribe. Do not all writers, [sacred and profane] without comparing Notes, combine in painting them false as they are fair, and silly as they are sweet; artful in modest disguise, and impudent when Lewd; treacherous, ambitious, Slaves to Avarice, the Foes of Reason, and never Friends to Thought. If Seneca may be believ'd, "a Woman never muses by herself, but she is musing on some Wickedness." All are of his Mind, and all consider them at best as flattering, pleasing, desirable Evils. Democrituswas so convinced of this, that, being questioned why he who was himself so big had married a Wife so little, he answer'd: Methinks, says he, as it is, I have chosen too big a one, when all I had to choose was Evil. But Protagoras went farther still, no Evil according to him exceeds that Evil, Woman. What made him give his Daughter in Marriage to his mortal Enemy?'4 Early misogynous literature, despite its modifications of the medieval tradition, remained as wearisome in its repetitiveness and as obscene in content.15 The querelle served a progressive and humane purpose only for the defenders of women. "towers," in Le Fort inexpugnable de I'honneur du sexe feminin (1555); and he, too, made women the inventors of agriculture, warfare, and letters. On these works, see Richardson (n. 1 above), pp. 38-42, 64-65, 90-100. The idea of a citadel or fort also inspired Daniel Tuvil's Asylum Veneris, or A Sanctuaryfor the Ladies (London, 1616). 14. "Sophia," Man Superior to Woman (1739), in Beauty's Triumph, or The Superiorityof the Fair Sex Invincibly Proved (London, 1751). This is a piece of feminist literature that incorporates the misogynous commonplaces. 15. On the repetitiveness and malice of such literature, from the Greeks and Romans through the Middle Ages and early modern period (and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well), see Rogers (n. 9 above). Obscenity abounds in this literature, from Autumn 1982 Signs 13 The repetitiveness of the misogynist tradition nonetheless affected the responses of the prowomen side. Called again and again to rebut a flood of arguments that women were excluded from the concept of man in scripture, were not truly human, and were subject to man by the authority of religion and history,16 the feminists reiterated their ideas, which in themselves were novel, but did not develop them further. The static quality of the genre should not mislead us into accepting the commonly held notion that the querelle was a kind of literary game, however.17 Both its misogyny and its feminism expressed passionately held views and tell, as well, of a historically changing gender construction that was being imposed and resisted. Consciousnessand Culture To this day, every feminist who has followed Christine de Pisan has had to pass through a particular crisis of consciousness, which she described with as much self-awareness as Petrarch brought to his inner struggles with a dawning modern ethos. Unlike the male humanist, however, Christine could not draw on classical learning to guide her toward her new intellectual position. She had to oppose what seemed and still seems to be the overwhelming authority of the learned on women's inferiority. The force of male disdain for women, expressed not just by one author or another but by virtually all the philosophers, poets, and men of letters (rhetoricians) she read, at first seemed too overwhelming for Christine to question its objective grounds. It was "too much [to hold], that so many famous men . . . should have lied, and in so many places, for I could scarcely find a volume [of moral philosophy], whoever its author, without... some chapters or sections blaming [women]." Having taken up the issue of misogyny, Christine began to explore women's experience. "I began to examine myself and my condition as a woman," she wrote. She turned to other women, "to princesses, great ladies, and authors of renown such as Ben Jonson and Pope to scurrilous pamphleteers such as Joseph Swetnam. 16. For example, Gratian du Pont, Controversesdes sexes masculinsetfemenin (1534), and Acidalius Valens, Dissertationparadoxale, oi l'on essayede prouver que les femmes ne sont pas des creatureshumaines (1595). Both are summarized in Richardson (n. 1 above), pp. 66-71, 143-45. 17. Telle, for example, did not find any "real" misogyny in the clerical expressions of disgust about women and marriage or in the querelle (n. 9 above). Even a woman scholar of the early querelle excused much of its misogyny as "a conventional acquiescence to a popular vogue" and "a literary pose" (Dow [n. 9 above], pp. 114, 115). One must then ask if men would think it simply a "literary" matter if women had turned out such a corpus of literature expressing disgust for men and marriage for several centuries, then had modified it to a generalized expression of contempt for men for another four centuries. 14 Early Feminist Theory Kelly to gentle women of lower station in great numbers, all of whom told me freely of their private and frank thoughts that I might know by my judgment... if it were true what so many men ... witnessed." But before these first efforts at consciousness raising took hold, Christine internalized the learned disparagements of her sex: "I relied more on the judgment of others than on what I felt or knew of myself." Out of touch with the ground of truth, her own and other women's experience, she was overcome by man's contempt for women. More and more authors came to mind who found her and all women "abominable," "the vessel, as the men say, of all evil and of all vices." Plunged into sorrow, this first feminist theorist found herself"despising [herself ] and all womankind," assailing her maker because she had not been "born into this world ... masculine."'1 It was out of this distinctively female anguish, woman's version of the self-disdain of the colonized, that Christine's prayer for herself and all women was answered. Three allegorical ladies appeared to her (Reason, Righteousness, and Justice), along with Mary herself, the Queen of Heaven, who assured her, "I am and shall be evermore the head of womankind."1' Strengthened by their support and by the women who spoke to her across class lines of their sense of themselves as women, Christine de Pisan reached what has come down to us as the first analysis of the sexual bias of culture. From acceptance of women's inferiority, she moved toward a recognition of the man-made, misogynous nature of that claim. Universal as it might seem, the disparagement of women was not validated by her own and other women's experience. "Although you have seen such things in writing, you have not seen them with your eyes," one of her ladies pointed out. She had been blinded by those renowned authors into believing "that which thou feelest not, nor see not, nor know other than by a plurality of strange opinions." Rather that objective descriptions of female nature and behavior, she now saw the opinions that had immobilized her as projections of men-of male fears, interests, and concerns: "The books that so sayeth, women made them not."20 The veil of cultural authority fell from her eyes, and Christine saw the venerated men of learning not only as human but as male, necessarily viewing women from their own subjective, sexual position. Ovid turned from erotic poetry to vicious attacks on women, for example, because, as one of her ladies informed her, he was castrated. So punished for loving unwisely once too often, he subsequently wanted women to appear unattractive rather than unavailable. The Tuscan 18. (:;te of Ladys (n. 9 above), 1:1. 19. Ibid., 3:1. 20. Ibid., 1:2, 2:13. No one surpassed Christine's description of the passage to feminist consciousness until Mary Daly's powerful formulations, particularly in BeyondGod the Father (Boston: Beaconi Press, 1973), pp. 13-55. Signs Autumn 1982 15 poet, Ceco d'Ascoli, defamed women because he had been shunned by them. Moreover, he was burned at the stake for what Christine discreetly referred to as "his vice."21Grasping the presence of ideology in what she read, in the form of an ideology of sex, put Christine in a position to critique the image of women she had at first internalized. Her visionary ladies spoke to her not only in tones of modern empiricism, urging her to accept as true only what conformed to her (and other women's) experience, they also pointed out that the writings of the literate and the learned were distorted by what we now call sexism. The passage of consciousness that brought Christine to name and oppose misogyny rather than suffer it led to her "citadel" and to all the defenses of women that followed it. Christine's City of Womengave rise to the four-century-long debate concerning women's evil and their excellence; their equality, superiority, and inferiority to men; and simply their defense. She had initiated the querelledesfemmes by refocusing the old medieval debate on marriage and satires on women onto the issue of misogyny itself and by opening this debate to women. The feminists who followed her took book learning as their starting point, as Christine and the humanists had. Texts, sacred and profane, constituted learning. But the early feminists, with no great educational credentials, were unremittingly critical of the authors-ancient, modern, even scriptural-at a time when the auctoreswere still auctoritatesto many. The explanations they gave for the hostility and bias they found in the traditional texts and in the "grave dons, learned men, and men of sense"22 who were writing contemporary invectives against women were largely psychological, as were Christine's. They particularly noted male competitiveness, how men denigrated women out of fear that women would be found equal or even superior to them.23 In 1659 the Dutch scholar Anna Maria van Schurman pleaded with the author of a treatise on women's excellence not to dedicate it to her because of the envy notice of her learning would arouse. "You are not ignorant with what evil eyes the greatest part of men ( . . . men of great esteem) do behold what tends to our praise," she wrote in words all these feminists echo. "They think we are well dealt with, if we obtain pardon for aspiring to these higher studies."24 Meeting contempt from educated men in their personal lives, they confronted the poetic, philosophical, and religious 21. Cyte of Ladys (n. 9 above), 1:9, 13. 22. Mary Astell, SomeReflectionsupon Marriage, with Additions, 4th ed. (London, 1730), p. 74. 23. [Judith Drake], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696), pp. 20-25; Anna Maria van Schurman, The Learned Maid, or Whethera Maid May Be a Scholar? (London, 1659), pp. 23-41; Lucrezia Marinella, La nobiliti et l'eccellenzadelle donne co' diffetti, e mancamentide gli huomini (1600) (Venice, 1621), pp. 181-82; "Sophia," WomenNot Inferior to Man (1739), in Beauty'sTriumph,or The Superiorityof the Fair Sex InvinciblyProved (London, 1751), p. 28. 24. "Letter to John Beverovicius," in van Schurman, pp. 38-39. 16 Kelly Early Feminist Theory expressions of disdain for women as but further examples of the psychology of educated men. Indeed, most of their defenses were written as angry retorts to specific literary attacks on women, as Christine had responded to the Roman de la rose and to Matheolus's Lamentations. To give some examples and name some of the feminists of the querelle, Marie de Romieu, stung by a satire written by her own brother and determined to prove that women could indeed write, in 1591 published as her first poetic work a discourse on the excellence of women.25 A number of well-identified English women published such rejoinders, as well as some pseudonymous authors who are clearly women.26 Three women took up women's defense in response to a particularly scurrilous pamphlet of 1615: the poet Rachel Speght and two very sharp, seemingly higher-placed women who styled themselves Ester Sowernam and Constantia Munda.27 Joseph Swetnam's The Araignment of Lewde, Idle, Frowtardand Unconstant Women had provoked them by its crude craving for power over women and gross projections. This self-styled "bearbaiter" of women (incoherently) wrote, for example: "Is it not strange of ... a woman's tongue that neither correction can chastise nor fair means quiet, for there is a kind of venom in it, that neither by fair means or foul they are to be ruled: all beasts by man are made tame, but a woman's tongue will never be tame."28 Swetnam's obsessive contempt for his mother and his projection of male sexual urges onto "lustful" women were not lost on his feminist critics, any more than his ignorance of the 25. Marie de Romieu, Brief Discours, que 1'excellencede la femmesurpassecelle de 'homnme (Paris, 1591). See Richardson (n. 1 above), pp. 123-25. 26. (ertain pseudonymous rebuttals may be questioned for male authorship, such as the earliest English example, Jane Anger's Her Protectionfor Women (London, 1589) and The Women'sSharpeRevenge (n. 6 above) of 1640 by the self-styled spinners Mary Tattlewell and Joane Hit-him-Home. According to Utley (n. 9 above, p. 314), Anger's tract was also a "who response to a lost pamphlet. The "spinsters" directed their work against John Taylor, writ those scandalous Pamphlets, called the Juniper and Crab-tree Lectures." See Ferguson (n. 3 above) for a bibliography on both works and for Taylor as a possible author of The Women'sSharpe Revenge. The author(s?) clearly had some training in Latin, but the homely not metaphors and roiste-ous language fit their ostensible class. Jane Anger's name need be a pseudonym, for there were several Jane Angers living at the time; however, the case has been made that a male parodist, perhaps John Lyly, may have written the work (see Helen Andras Kahin, "Jane Anger and John Lyly," Modern Language Quarterly 8, no. 1 [March 1947]: 31-35). 27. Rachel Speght, A Muzzlefor Melastomus (London, 1617) and Certain Queries to the Baiter of Woman (London, 1617). On her life and work, see Dictionaryof National Biography, s.v. "Speght, Rachel," and Ferguson (n. 3 above). Ester Sowernam, Ester Hath Hang'd Haman (London, 1617); Constantia Munda, The Wormingof a Mad Dogge (London, 1617). On the Swetnam cont-oversy, see Camden (n. 9 above), pp. 241-71, and Stenton (n. 9 above), pp. 204-8. 28. Joseph Swetnam, The Araignnmentof Lewde, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), p. 40. This very popular work went through twelve editions between 1615 and 1690. A play was even put on in London called Swetnamthe Woman-Hater,Arraigned by Women, possibly by Thomas Heywood (1620). Signs Autumn 1982 17 sources he falsely cited or misquoted. They deftly exposed his illiteracy and illogic. Ester Sowernam (like virtually every feminist in the long debate) had once again to point out how rare it is for women to allure and offer themselves to men, how common for men "to seek and solicit women to lewdness."29 But if Swetnam's women critics refuted his arraignment easily because of its patent fallacies, they nonetheless felt besieged by "every pedantic goose quill; every fantastic poetaster." Constantia Munda and her circle of women were clearly outraged by a mounting wave of misogyny streaming from "the scribbling pens of savage and uncouth Monsters."30 At the end of the seventeenth century, two Englishwomen felt compelled to reply to "a rude and disingenuous discourse delivered by Mr. John Sprint in a Sermon at a Wedding," in which he expatiated on the utter subordination of women to their husbands. Eugenia, one of these authors, is not known except as one who "never came yet within the clutches of a husband." The other, the anonymous author of The Ladies Defence, was identified in a later edition as the poet Lady Mary Chudleigh was married indeed and who recommended that (1656-1710)-who women "shun that wretched state."31 Another poet, Sarah Fyges Egerton, appears to have written The Female Advocate (1686) at the age of fourteen in reply to an obscene "late satire on women," Love Given O're by Robert Gould; Judith Drake penned An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696); and women of low and high station continued the polemic in the eighteenth century. A laundress, Mary Collier, who had been taught to read by her parents, composed a long poem, The Woman's Labour (1739), to refute one Stephen Duck, who wrote The Thresher'sLabour as if only men worked; and Anne Howard, viscountess Irwin, denounced Alexander Pope's coarse and malicious Epistle II, To a Lady at about the same time. In Italy, Laura Terracina objected in 1555 to Ariosto's portrayal of women.32 Moderata Fonte wrote a poem on the equality of the sexes; and in 1600, the Venetian poet Lucrezia Marinella critiqued the antiwoman sentiments of several poets and writers of the Italian Renaissance and refuted general misogynous arguments as well.33 Marinella formulated the most systematic analysis of "the causes that impel knowledge29. Sowernam (n. 27 above), pp. 44-45. 30. Munda (n. 27 above), pp. 1-5. 31. "To the Ladies," in Ferguson (n. 3 above). John Sprint was a nonconformist minister. His sermon was published a year later as The Bride-Woman'sCounsellor (London, 1700). On Eugenia's The Female Advocate (London, 1699), see Stenton (n. 9 above), pp. 204-8. Lady Chudleigh's response is The LadiesDefence, or a Dialogue betweenSir John Brute, Sir William Loveall, Melissa, and a Parson (London, 1700). 32. Laura Terracina, Discorsosopra tutti li primi canti d'OrlandoFurioso (Venice, 1550), found in Kelso (n. 9 above), pp. 5-37. 33. Lucrezia Marinella (n. 23 above) cites Moderata Fonte's II meritodelle donne (Venice, 1600) several times but rejects her argument for equality in favor of the superiority of women to men. For a biographical sketch, see Enciclopedia biograficae bibliograficaitaliana, 18 Kelly Early Feminist Theory able and learned men to criticize and vituperate women." She isolated four such causes, three of which (self-love, envy, and lack of talent) had to do with a male need to feel superior to women, and one (disdain) that stemmed from frustration of male sexual impulses. Even Aristotle-or especially Aristotle, because of the authority of his views on womenhad to be evaluated in light of his personal sexual relations if those views were to be understood. At times, it was his own sex he loved controppo fervore, she found, leading him to inconsistent, contemptuous statements about women. But also shame, anger, and envy of how women are loved, in particular his feelings toward the concubine whom he married and to whom he was sexually enslaved, led him to deprecate women.34 Marinella even challenged male writings in praise of women. She faulted Sperone's dialogue On theDignity of Women(1542) for placing women in a servile relation to men and Tasso's defense of women because he exempted only "heroic women" (that is, women rulers) from the notion of women's native imperfection. Many other women joined the fray.35 If they were not stirred to polemic by particular attacks on their sex, they wrote to counter a general attitude of disdain such as Marie de Gournay complained of. She had been a respected intellectual companion of Montaigne and knew that men would not even read what she had written and would boast of it; no matter how eloquently or well she reasoned, she would be dismissed with that certain nod of the head that means, "it's only a woman speaking."36 Contempt for women was public and unashamed down through the eighteenth century, when the historian Catherine Macaulay wrote of the ser. 6, vol. 2 (Milan: EBBI Instituto Editoriale Italiano, 1936), pp. 9-10; Antonio Belloni, I seicento: Storia letterariad'ltalia, vol. 9 (Milan: Vallardi, 1958), pp. 198-99. 34. Marinella (n. 23 above), pp. 40, 146-47. 35. Marguerite of Navarre composed a book of letters "pour defendre son sexe contre d'injuste mepris," which is lost but was summarized in a later work. Gabrielle Suchon's utterly feminist views are set forth in her Traite de la moraleet depolitique(Paris, 1693) and in a work much like Mary Astell's contemporary Reflectionsupon Marriage (n. 22 above), Du Celibat volontaire ou la vie sans engagements(Paris, 1700), in which she advocates a single life for women. Richardson (n. 1 above) and Kelso (n. 9 above) cite as prowoman writers the poet Louise Labe; Helinsenne de Crenne, author of the first autobiographical novel, for her criticism of her husband's attitudes (Epistresfamiliers [Paris, 1538], epistre 3); Madeleine des Roches for urging women to write, particularly against their accusers ("Epistre aux dames," Oeuvres [Paris, 1579], ode 3); Charlotte de Brachart for maintaining, in aHarengue of 1604, that men deprive women of education to magnify their own attainments. There are undoubtedly many other as yet unknown women who joined the querelle, some of whom are mentioned in the writings of women we do know. 36. Marie de Gournay, Grief des dames (1676), in La Fille d'alliance de Montaigne: Marie de Gournay, ed. Mario Schiff (Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1910), pp. 89-91, 94-95. In 1910, Schiff was still saying, "It's only a woman." He found himself "exclaiming impatiently" with her contemporaries, he confessed, "'this girl gives herself the airs of a man!,' but ultimately she inspires . . . a certain respect." However, Schiff holds that the price of Mlle. de Gournay's learning was that she knew neither youth nor beauty; and her "petite im mortalite" resulted solely from her friendship with Montaigne (ibid., pp. 1, 8, 45). Signs Autumn 1982 19 "censure and ridicule" women suffer from "writers of all descriptions, from the deep thinking philosophers to the man of... gallantry, who, by the bye, sometimes distinguishes himself by qualities which are not greatly superior to those he despises in women. Nor can I better illustrate the truth of this observation than by . . . the polite and gallant Chesterfield. Women, says his lordship, 'are only children of a larger growth. ... A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does an engaging child; but he neither consults them, nor trusts them in serious matters.' "37 The querelle persisted in opposition to this open, published disdain, ringing with language of battle for 400 years. Although they lacked a social analysis of male psychology, the realization that the received wisdom about women stemmed from particular psychosexual experiences, all of them male, gave feminists a critical perspective on the intellectual tradition that was, as far as I can see, unique. The querelle as a genre fostered a critical attitude, of course. There were "sides" to the debate on women. Yet only the feminist side refuted texts and authors. Holy Writ and the pithy statements of the learned were trotted out by all the misogynists, no matter how learned or ignorant they themselves might be. They, and the authorities they cited, attacked women. Feminists attacked not men but misogyny and male bias in the literate culture. "We do not menace the men, but their minds, not their persons, but their pens ... which indeed toward us have been insupportable and intolerable."38 Every learned tradition was subject to feminist critique, since all were dominated by men and justified male subjection of women. Feminist wit penetrated to the core of male pretension in the irrefutable arguments and commonsensical adages that supported men's power over women. Strength of mind certainly goes along with strength of body, Mary Astell concurred; "and 'tis only for some odd accidents, which philosophers have not yet thought worth while to enquire into, that the sturdiest porter is not the wisest man."39 Aristotelians were held up to ridicule for their phallic conception of woman as a mutilated and/or impotent male.40 If women appeared as "imperfect men" to 37. Catherine Macaulay, Letterson Education (Dublin, 1740), pp. 130-31. 38. Tattlewell and Hit-him-Home (n. 6 above), p. 109. The superior abstraction of the women's position should be appreciated. From their position as subjects in the relation of domination, they could recognize and attack the structures of oppression, not just the persons of their oppressors. 39. Astell (n. 22 above), p. 120. 40. "For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male" (De GenerationeAnimalium, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross, 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980-81], 2:3 [737A25-30]); "Woman is as it were an impotent male because she concocts catamenia [menstrual discharge] and not semen" (ibid., 1:20 [728A18-20]). See Maryanne Horowitz for a study of these and related passages, in "Aristotle and Woman,"Journal of theHistoryof Biology 9, no. 2 (Fall 1976): 183-213. 20 Early Feminist Theory Kelly Aristotle, doubtless that was because "they are deficient in that ornament of the chin, a beard-what else [could he mean]?"41But deeper than wit, the feminists saw that the learning they inherited was not merely biased, it was deeply flawed by male interest in maintaining the supremacy of men. Mary Astell despaired of learning anything about women from books, "because the writers, being men, envious of the good works of women haven't recounted their great deeds."42 The women noted that male authors appealed to nature and reason to "explain" the exclusion of women from learning, government, and public office, but we "ought to have better proofs . . . than the bare word of the persons who advance [such arguments], as their being parties so immediately concerned must render all they say of this kind highly suspicious."43 Their critique of culture was one of the major achievements of the early feminist opposition to misogyny. The defenses of the querelle rest upon a refutation of male authority as expressed in what was accepted as knowledge or learning. That left the feminists-as the burden of their response to "those fine discourses which have been made against the women from our great fore-fathers to the present"44-the task of recovering a true image of women, an image that could be safely internalized to mobilize women's powers. Womenand Power Rejecting the distorted image of women presented to them as the word of God and the wisdom of man, the defenders of women sought to break through the prejudice and limits of male learning, initiating the first attempts at "women's studies." The City of Women and the defenses that followed it aimed to reorganize knowledge of women (and men) from the feminist standpoint. As a genre, they consist largely of reinterpretations of the record on women, historical and scriptural. Their rewriting of history, which is what I want to focus on here, is very telling for the kind of revisions early feminists wanted to make. The defenses generally spend some time on exemplars of the virtues of women-their chastity, constancy, and labors, all of which were of being deprecated. But chiefly, they were concerned with two aspects women's behavior under special attack. The contempt for women that marked early modern misogyny stemmed from attitudes that accepted, 41. Female Rights Vindicated, or the Equality of the Sexes Morally and Physically Proved (London, 1758), pp. 114-20. 42. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies,for the Advancementof their True and GreatestInterest, 2d ed. corrected (London, 1695), pt. 1, p. 48. 43. "Sophia," WomanNot Inferior to Man (n. 23 above), p. 20. See also the paraphrase of "Sophia" in Female Rights Vindicated,pp. 47, 51. 44. Astell, Reflectionsupon Marriage (n. 22 above), p. 76. Signs Autumn 1982 21 even required, marriage. To argue women's subjection to husbands, however, and to deny them any other mode of life, male authors had to, and did, consider women as rationally defective. They could not govern, nor could they be learned-which is exactly why the early feminists used history mainly to find precedents for women's governance (and hence their right to self-rule) and for their learning (of which they felt newly and unjustly deprived). Arms and letters, ars et mars: Women were shut out of the twofold work of culture and civilization (as upper-class society conceived it) and were told their "nature" would not allow it. "Would to God," Lucrezia Marinella protested, "that in our times women were allowed the practice of arms and letters. What marvels would we see .... I wish that these [detractors of women] would make this experiment: that they raise a boy and a girl of the same age, and both of sound mind and body, in letters and in arms. They would see in a short time how the girl would be more perfectly instructed than the boy and would soon surpass him."45 Short of such social experimentation, what the feminists could do and did was to show by historical example the true nature of women with respect to power and to reason. The fact that women governed and led men and nations wisely had great significance for the feminist side of the debate. To Christine, the Salic Law of 1328, which removed women from inheritance of the French crown, was still new and offensive. She noted that the reigns of the queens of France were just and moderate, as were those of many women, "great ladies, modest, and lesser ones," who ruled territories after their husbands' deaths and who were just as greatly loved by their subjects.46 She herself wrote a book on warfare, and her Livre des trois vertus required ladies to know how to command, in defense and attack.47 However, as the European states consolidated, women were steadily excluded from such functions. As the military, financial, and juridical powers of feudal families became "public," that is, state functions, men moved into the new positions of state control-and the male conception of ladylike behavior assumed its more modern form. Castiglione, who transformed the feudal lord into a courtier and defined this style of life for generations of Europeans who henceforth served princes, defined the lady's new role as well. Still "courteous" toward ladies, he allowed them equal learning with the courtier. But contrary even to contemporary practice, he removed them from training at arms and horsemanship.48 45. Marinella (n. 23 above), pp. 47-48. 46. Cyte of Ladys (n. 9 above), 1:13. 47. Christine de Pisan's book on warfare is called The Book of Faytes of Arms and Chivalrie in its English translation. Also see Bell (n. 9 above), p. 180. 48. For a more extended analysis of the import of The Courtier for women, see Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Womenin European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), pp. 137-64. 22 Kelly Early Feminist Theory In Castiglione's lifetime, Eleanor of Aragon, as duchess of Ferrara, assumed sole command of the city when it was besieged by Venice in the war of 1482-84, and Caterina Sforza ruled the petty state of Pesaro in her own name, taking command and fighting to maintain it. Until the European states were fully consolidated, women continued to exercise governing and military powers in times of need. Indeed, as we are now beginning to rediscover, women were a normal part of European armies from the fourteenth century until well into the nineteenth century, in addition to the noblewomen who participated in positions of command.49 Nonetheless, by the second half of the seventeenth century, Castiglione's image of the disarmed lady excluded from functions of state prevailed throughout Europe as ideology-and increasingly as reality. "All heroic actions, public employments, powerful governments, and eloquent pleadings are denied our sex in this age," Margaret Cavendish wrote in 1656, under Commonwealth rule. And her words remained as true for Restoration as for Republican England. Although duchess of Newcastle and exceptional for her intelligence as well as her connections, she had to settle for writing as the only outlet for her ambition. She would not even read history, she claimed, certain as she was of how different it was for women in the past who "have outdone all the glory I can aim at."'0 In the face of such changes in the power of some women, the feminists of the querelle developed another strategy to fight back. They used that surety about the valor, martial ability, and government of women in the past to argue that women's powers, and the prevailing notion of women's nature, were newly restricted. Marie de Gournay noted rightly that the Salic Law was devised to control a disputed succession; it was enforced only in France, where women in earlier times had as great a deliberative role as men. In the remote past, the Spartan men consulted with women on all "public and private" matters, as did the Germans of Tacitus. Other nations were ruled only by women.51 The spinsters Mary Tattlewell and Joane Hit-him-Home raised the ghost of the crudely armed Long Meg of Westminister to do battle for her sex in 49. On Italian women, see ibid.; for the military exploits of English and French aristocratic women, see Stenton (n. 9 above), pp. 251-52, and Abensour, Histoire generale du feminismne(n. 1 above), pp. 147-51; for women as part of European armies as combatants, see Barton Hacker, "Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance," Signs: journal of Womenrin Culture and Society 6, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 643-71. 50. In Mahl and Koon (n. 3 above), p. 141. For examples of aristocratic resentment of the exclusion of women "out of all Power and Authority," see Cavendish's address to Cambridge and Oxford demanding equal education for women, and her "Female Orations" in Philosophical and Physical Opinions (london, 1655) and Orations of Divers Sorts (London, 1662). (n Cavendish, see Dictionaryof National Biography, s.v. "Cavendish, Margaret," and Ferguson (n. 3 above). et desfemmes,in La Fille dalliance de Montaigne: 51. Marie de (Gournay,Egalite deshornrmes Marie de Gourmnay, edl. Mario Schiff (Paris: Librairie Honore Champion, 1910), pp. 68 ff. Signs Autumn 1982 23 The Women'sSharpeRevenge. Meg had earned King Henry's praise for the good fight she showed the French at the Battle of Boulogne (1544): "With my blows and knocks, I made their bones ache." Now her memory was evoked to protest the seventeenth-century feminizing of women.52 The feminists rightly understood that the issue of female power was critical, even for women of no rank. Something more was at stake than the participation of upper-class women in the exercise of state functions. The notion was forming that women, as women, were devoid of power and authority by their very nature. This, indeed, was what the querelle was largely about. On the feminist side, Amazonian figures and tales of matriarchy, along with biographies of actual women warriors and rulers, were perpetuated to keep alive a fading image of independent women and of women as makers of culture and civilization. On the misogynist side, men of otherwise opposed classes and parties were joining ranks in a newfound conviction about woman's "natural" subjection to man. Republicans, bourgeois by class and outlook (as in Renaissance Florence and Venice, Calvinist Geneva, and Puritan England), had no question about the domestic and subordinate nature of women.53 From Geneva, John Knox's The First Blast of the Trumpetagainst the Monstrous Regimentof Women(1558) heralded God's word on how monstrous it was for a woman to reign over men. Banished from England and Scotland by Mary Tudor and the regent Mary of Guise, Knox had his own personal and political reasons to storm at governance by women. But Knox's position was validated in the public eye by two major developments that were affecting women in the process of state formation. One was the loss of power women of rank suffered as states eroded the military, juridical, and political powers of aristocratic families. The other was the formation of the preindustrial, patriarchal household as the basic social unit, as well as the economic unit of postfeudal society. State legislation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries strengthened the household as an instrument of social control. Laws concerning the poor and laws against vagrants, prostitutes, witches, and even religious orders in Protestant countries herded people into households for their livelihood and placed the governance of the unpropertied males-and all women-under household "master." Both these processes weakened traditional supports for female authority and subjected women to patriarchal power in the family and the state.54 52. Epistle, in Tattlewell and Hit-him-Home (n. 6 above). On Meg, see Patricia Gartenberg, "An Elizabethan Wonder Woman: The Life and Fortunes of Long Meg of Westminister," Journal of Popular Culture (forthcoming). 53. Whereas the religious institutions of Calvinist Geneva worked positively for women, for example, its republican institutions sorely restricted them. See E. William Monter, "Women in Calvinist Geneva (1550-1800)," Signs: Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society 6, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 189-209. 54. Studies are sorely needed on the relation of state formation to the status of women 24 Kelly Early Feminist Theory Despite the social reality that removed all women but queens from the direct exercise of power by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the historical memory of armed women and female government persisted in the defenses of the querelle, along with commemoration of women of learning. Shaped by the objective of finding such examples, the historical content of the defenses is fairly primitive. Like Christine, the early feminists simply drew on the histories of illustrious women that began with Boccaccio, as well as upon similar ancient and medieval sources, for "exemplars" of women's capacities.55 The concepts of ideology and gender underlying this work, however, were novel and advanced. The realization that histories are constructed from a male position-and reinforce that position-is still to be accepted by most in early modern Europe. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975); Joan Kelly, "Family Life: A Historical Perspective," in Household and Kin, ed. Amy Swerdlow (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1981), pp. 1-45; Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston 1978), all with references to further works. Lawrence Stone surveys many of the political and familial developments for England, with rich bibliography, in The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1977). On the extirpation of witches living as single women on the fringes of society, see E. William Monter, "Pedestal and Stake: Courtly Love and Witchcraft," in Becoming Visible: Womenin European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1977), pp. 119-36, and his bibliographical essay "The Historiography of European Witchcraft: Progress and Prospects," Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory 2, no. 4 (Spring 1972): 435-51. For economic and social history, see Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980), with further references. On law, see Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederick W. Maitland, The History qf English Lawu(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898); John Bellamy, Crimeand Public Orderin England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); and Michael R. Weisser, Crimeand Punishment in Early Modern Europe (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979). 55. Christine used the lives of saints as well as Boccaccio's biographies of pagan women. Boccaccio himself drew chiefly from Valerius Maximus, Livy, Hyginus, and Tacitus ([n. 7 above], p. xxix). His De claris mulieribus initiated a tradition of' historical biographies of women-not necessarily feminist-upon which subsequent defenses could and did draw. Vespasiano, the great fifteenth-century biographer, did a work similar to Boccaccio's on women, as yet unpublished. In Ferrara in 1497, Fra Jacopo de Bergamo published a collection of the lives of ancient and contemporary women. In England, Thomas Heywood wrote two such histories of women in the 1640s. George Ballard, complaining how women's great achievements were not commemorated, compiled an outstanding collection of the lives of English women from 1400 onward (Memoirsof Several Ladies of Great Britain, Who Have Been Celebratedfor Their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences [Oxford, 1752]). Women also contributed to this genre which, when combined with the feminist perspective that originated in the defenses, may be viewed as the earliest form of women's history. This is certainly the case with Mary Scott's The Female Advocate (London, 1774) and Mary Hays's Female Biography, 6 vols. (London, 1803). Almost all these works are still good sources for historians of women. On the biographies of "women worthies" as precursors to women's history, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women's History in Transition: The European Case," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3/4 (Spring/Summer 1976): 83-103. Signs Autumn 1982 25 professional historians (who are still largely male).56 The early feminists were fully aware of such falsification. Histories are "perverted to debase us," as "Sophia" maintained.57 They are "writ by them [men]," as Mary Astell put it, and "they recount each other's great exploits, and have always done so."58 Yet the feminists thought they merely had to disentangle the truth about women from those distorted historical sources to undo the consequences of male bias. "When one is apprised of this inequitable proceeding of the men, and takes the trouble of examining into past times, it appears ... that the women have not been behind hand with the men in any thing, and that the virtue they have demonstrated upon every occasion, is far beyond aught the men can cite in their favor."59 This is the spirit and often the very words of most of the defenses, beginning with Christine. Casting out all of Boccaccio's notions of the manly and "exceptional" character of women's historic achievements, she used his biographies to validate a wholly positive notion of woman's nature.60 Indeed, she even turned his tales of Isis, Ceres, Minerva, and Carmenta (founder of Rome and the Latin language) into a compelling case for the female origins of culture and civilization.61 These mythic founders of language, agriculture, the several arts and sciences, and states dropped out from most later defenses, along with Christine's saints and holy women. Those who remained to figure most significantly as models of womanly nature were women of learning and women warriors and/or rulers. Queens and possible queens continued to stir feminists by their mere being. They also gave material support to the feminists' efforts to break through the barrier of women's presumed ignorance and incapacity, as did other women in high places. Christine de Pisan had written her book on the education of women for Margaret of Burgundy as she was about to marry the French dauphin; Bathsua Makin wrote hers for Mary, eldest daughter of the duke of York. Mary Astell directed her proposal for a woman's college to the future Queen Anne, then princess of Denmark (who indeed intended to subsidize it, until the bishop of Salisbury dissuaded her).62 Marie de 56. Despite a decade of women's history of high professional caliber, writing history in male terms continues. See Mary Beth Norton, "American History: Review Essay," Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society 5, no. 2 (Winter 1979): 324-37. 57. "Sophia," Woman'sSuperiorExcellenceover Man (1740), in Beauty'sTriumph:or, The Superiorityof the Fair Sex Invincibly Proved (London, 1751), p. 110. 58. Astell, Reflectionsupon Marriage (n. 22 above), p. 121. Male authors, says the author of Female Rights Vindicated (n. 41 above), are "prejudiced in their own favour, the virtues and advantages of their sex are everywhere exaggerated; the merit of women is depreciated and debased through an opposite interest" (p. 48). 59. Female Rights Vindicated(n. 41 above), p. 48. 60. For a comparison of Boccaccio and Christine, see Bell (n. 9 above). 61. Cyte of Ladys (n. 9 above), vol. 1. 62. On this episode, see Ballard (n. 55 above), pp. 445-60; Stenton (n. 9 above), pp. 185, 220-28. 26 Kelly Early Feminist Theory Gournay dedicated her Egalite des hommeset desfemmes to Anne of Austria, then queen of France, and was pensioned by her and her predecessor, Marie de Medici. Lady Chudleigh, who wrote The Ladies Defence, dedicated her poems to Queen Anne and her essays to the electress Sophia.63 But the most telling example of how female power continued to inspire the feminist side of the querelleis to be found in Mary Astell, in her reflections on the relation of the sexes at the turn of the eighteenth century. Mary Astell did not write a defense; but in addition to her wellknown proposal for a women's college, she wrote a stunning critique of marriage.64 Subscribing to the principles of the Anglican church and a ranked society, she described husbands in the first edition of this book in the hierarchical terms of early modern society. They were "lords and masters" of their wives, who were but "poor vassals."65Astell was tempted by the liberal position of John Locke on the right to revolt against tyranny, but only to the point of questioning how husbands should govern. Rank, including the superior rank of husbands and the right of superiors to rule their inferiors, seemed providential: "God has placed different ranks in the world, put some in a higher, and some in a lower station . .. for many good reasons." It was not a good enough argument for Mary Astell herself, however, that superiors "from the throne to the private family" ruled as representatives of God. She did not marry and could not advocate it for women. But when Queen Anne came to the English throne in 1702, the prospect of a woman governing in her own right once again precipitated in Mary Astell a fascinating feminist version of the Enlightenment's revolution in thought. This High Church woman, who objected in print to Locke's deistic views, now adopted one of the major arguments that freed scientific thought from the hold of scripture and the church. In a 1703 appendix to her Reflections upon Marriage, she invoked the principle Galileo had used to defend the movement of the earth around the sun. Arguing that scriptural language conforms to custom so as to better convey its unique theological message, she dismissed biblical references to women's sub63. Women of means also subscribedto books by women and/or on them as another way to subsidize them in eighteenth-centuryEngland (Stenton [n. 9 above], p. 241 and passim). Ferguson's First Feminists (n. 3 above) will shed some light on women's networks during the early modern period in England, but much work is needed to uncover supportive connections among feminists. We at least know that Christine wrote of the groups of women she talked to "as a woman," and Constantia Munda mentioned a group of women with whom she discussed her work. Many of the early feminists knew each other personally. They wrote dedications to each other's books, as Mary Astell did for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; they corresponded, as did Bathsua Makin and Anna Maria van Schurman; and they commemorated each other's learning in their defenses, as Lucrezia Marinella did for Moderata Fonte, "Sophia" for Lucrezia Marinella, and so on. 64. An Essayin Defence of the FemaleSex (n. 23 above), once ascribed to Mary Astell, has been disputed as hers and is indeed inconsistent with her tone and several of her ideas. Moira Ferguson, in First Feminists (n. 3 above), among others attributes it to Judith Drake. 65. Astell, Reflectionsupon Marriage (n. 22 above), p. 71 and passim. Signs Autumn 1982 27 jection as but another such accommodation to prevailing ways. The relation of the sexes is a universal issue, she found, which pertains to human nature at large and not just to the recipients of revelation. The equality of women was therefore an issue for reason to decide-and clearly, with Anne governing England, all the evidence of sense and reason argued against male superiority. Not only was every man not superior to every woman; one woman was now superior to every man in the realm. If every woman were subject to any man by some law of nature, Astell pointed out, the queen would have to obey her footman. And if men were now to fall back from that position, maintaining that woman's inferiority means only that some women are inferior to some men, it would mean that the reverse would be equally true: some men are decidedly inferior to some women.66 So much for the presumed natural inferiority of women. The old principle of female rule had once again won out over the doctrine of woman's universal subjection to "rational man." The power of women of rank was a weak foundation on which to rest hopes for woman's ultimate emancipation, as Mary Astell did.67 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, women's sway had been sorely limited, as the feminists themselves had been noting; and by the end of the century, rank itself was to be swept away by the bourgeois social order. Yet in the historical transition from feudal to bourgeois society, most of the early feminists of the querelle continued to appeal to, and carried on a conservative romance with, female representatives of the old order. In part, their political conservatism was a limitation of their class. Isolated by class privilege, they had little knowledge of the lives of most other women and did not look to them as a source of power. For all their fierce retorts to misogyny, for example, they never noticed its single most horrendous expression in early modern Europe: the hanging or burning alive of some 100,000 or more women as witches. Like the early modern utopian socialists whom they resemble in this regard, the early feminist theorists looked to enlightenment and the traditional sources of power when they hoped for social change. And because they were women for whom sexual politics were central, they looked with nostalgia to times when those traditional powers were exercised by women. Even their sexual politics appear conservative to our time. Caught in up opposition to misogyny, the feminists of the querelle remained bound by the terms of that dialectic. What they had to say to women and society was largely reactive to what misogynists said about women. Yet the way beyond that resistance to misogyny had to lie through it. The 66. Ibid., pp. 146-47, 166-67. 67. Mary Astell ended the appendix of her book on marriage with a plea to Queen Anne to extend liberty to women, utterly stirred by the vision of what that would initiate: "the women's tracing a new path to honor in which none shall walk but such as scorn to cringe" (ibid., pp. 178-80). 28 Kelly Early Feminist Theory alternative was to accept and internalize the images that showed women of all ranks to be inferior and subject to men-images of the virago, the disarmed lady, the modest woman, the vessel of evil. To oppose misogyny was to initiate the long feminist struggle for women's full humanity and for the humanity of society as well. The great achievement of the early feminist theorists was to set that dialectic in motion. Their struggle was not embodied in a political movement. It was limited to a battle of pens. But in that battle they exposed the male bias of learning and its misogynist intent to keep women subject to men. They showed how learning was used to abase women and created a countervailing image of historic female power. These gains were never lost. During the centuries when the powers of aristocratic women became ever more restricted and law, economics, and public authority restrained middle-class and poor women from breaking forth into public life, the feminists of the querelledefied and denied the accompanying images of women that robbed them of dignity and authority. Thus, they created an intellectual tradition in which the memory of the feudal rule of women, and dimmer memories of women armed and warring, kept alive a notion of women's governing powers. They defended the powers of a woman's mind with just as much vigordirectly, by their writings, and by commemorating the achievements of women of learning as well as women rulers. As yet, no one knows the full extent and effectiveness of that early feminist tradition.68 It is clear that for more than 400 years the feminist writers themselves drew strength and arguments from their predecessors in battle with misogyny. In their own time they won, at least for feminist consciousness, a broader and more generous view of women than that imposed by the narrowing gender prescriptions of early modern society. But that tradition went beyond the querelle. The opposition of early feminism to male ideology has remained central to subsequent feminist thought, as has the creation of adequate, empowering images of women. The demand for unbiased learning, and for women's unhampered use of it, originated in the resistance of early feminist theorists to the cultural and social colonization of women by men. Departmentof History City College of New York and Graduate Center City Universityof New York 68. Knowledge of the number of editions the feminist writings went through would be useful, as would establishment of which authors were incorporated by later ones or were referred to by women readers. These works were unmistakably written on behalf of women, and in reading them I felt they were also written for women. But we need to discover who their readership actually was as well as the networks of women who supported such projects.